In 1840 – Samuel F.B. Morse received a US patent for “Improvement in the mode of communicating information by signals by the application of electro-magnetism.” We call it Morse code.

In 1963 – A hotline was established between the Soviet Union and the United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis. While later it would become the famous “red telephone” it started as a teletype.

In 2003 – The WikiMedia Foundation was founded in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales to oversee the various Wiki projects like Wikipedia.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 240 B.C. – Greek astronomer, geographer, mathematician and librarian in Alexandria, Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference. His data was based on the length of shadows in different locations and simple geometry, but his calculations were not far wrong.

In 1623 – Mathematician Blaise Pascal was born in France. He invented a digital calculator, the Pascaline, to help his father in his tax-collecting work.

In 2003 – Apple released dock connector-to-USB 2.0 cables and drivers for third-generation iPods. Previous iPods had been FireWire only.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1908 – Scottish electrical engineer, Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, published a brief letter in the journal Nature, describing the essentials of making and receiving television images. He described using an electron gun in the neck of a cathode-ray tube to shoot electrons toward the flat end of the tube, which was coated with light-emitting phosphor. Others like Farnsworth and Baird would make just such devices years later.

In 2002 – Kevin Warwick had his chip removed. Warwick implanted the chip earlier that year in order to experiment with human-computer interaction, culminating in a direct connection to his wife.

In 2009 – The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a NASA robotic spacecraft was launched on its mission to collect information about the Moon, particularly around the poles.

In 2014 – Amazon announced their first cell phone the Fire Phone at an event in Seattle. The phone featured object recognition and a dynamic perspective 3D interface.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1936 – Edwin Armstrong presented FM radio at FCC headquarters. Armstrong played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. “[I]f the audience of 50 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room.”

In 1946 – The first mobile telephone call was made from a car in St. Louis, Missouri.

In 1997 – Programmers deciphered code written in the impenetrable Data Encryption Standard, the strongest legally exportable encryption software in the United States. The hackers organized over the Internet and cracked the software in five months, proving that stronger encryption was needed.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1911 – The Tabulating Company (founded by Herman Hollerith), the Computing Scale Company, and the International Time Recording Company merged to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York. They would later change the company name to International Business Machines,and later just IBM.

In 1963 – Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space, orbiting the Earth 48 times.

In 1977 – Software Development Laboratories was incorporated in Redwood Shores, California, by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates. They later came up with the catchier name, Oracle.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1878 – Photographer Eadweard Muybridge used high-speed photography to capture a horse’s motion. The photos showed the horse with all four feet in the air during some parts of its stride. Stop-motion photography was born.

In 1949 – Jay Forrester wrote down a proposal for core memory in his notebook. Core memory was the standard for computer memory until advances in semiconductors in the 1970s.

In 1987 – Compuserve’s Sandy Trevor and his team, which included inventor Steve Wilhite, released GIF version 87a. The new enhanced format allowed people to create compressed animations. “Under Construction” GIFs everywhere became possible.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1822 – Charles Babbage announced his difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables.”

In 1951 – The US Census Bureau officially put UNIVAC I into service calling it the world’s first commercial computer.

In 1962 – The European Space Research Organization, which would become the European Space Agency, was established in Paris.

In 1967 – NASA launched Mariner 5 on its mission to fly by Venus.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1925 – Charles Jenkins publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of silhouette pictures and sound, becoming the first person to demonstrate TV in the US.

In 1941 – John Mauchly visited John Atanasoff to see his computer. The two computer pioneers later battled in court over who was the legal inventor of the electronic digital computer.

In 1944 – Germany launched the first guided missile attack in history, sending V-1 rockets into London.

In 1983 – Pioneer 10 became the first human-made object to pass outside Pluto’s orbit and leave the central solar system.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1897 – Karl Elsener received a design patent for his “soldiers’ knife” for use by the Swiss army. The original had a wooden handle, a blade, a screwdriver and a can opener.

In 1936 – The first radio station with 500,000 watt power began testing as W8XAR in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Test broadcasts took place from 1 AM to 6 AM. The station is now known as KDKA.

In 1997 – 3Com Corp. and US. Robotics Corp. merged. The two companies combined US Robotics modems with 3Com’s interface cards.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1943 – Hungarians László and Georg Bíró, while living in Argentina, patented the first successful implementation of the ballpoint pen.

In 1977 – A few days after going on sale, Apple began shipping the Apple II for the first time.

In 2003 – The Spirit Rover launched on a Delta II rocket, beginning NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission.

In 2013 – Apple introduced iOS 7 and Apple OS X Mavericks at their Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. They also gave a sneak peek at the new cylindrical Mac Pro and announced their streaming music service called iTunes Radio.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.